“If our country falters because it is not prepared to accept – let’s be honest – to lose its children… then we are at risk.” Chief of French Defence Staff General Fabien Mandon

This brings to mind Wilfred Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
and builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

In the“season of peace and goodwill” the thoughts of our tiny leaders are turning to Armageddon. On the front page of the Daily Mail on 12th December, Minister for the Armed Forces, former Marine and MP for Selly Oak Al Carns is quoted as saying that “Britain is on a war footing” alongside NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte flagging up NATO intent with “Europe must prepare for the scale of war that our grandparents endured.”

There is something light minded about the way they pose this. As though it were conceptual. Something fictional. As if they can’t fully grasp the consequences of their actions, having never gone through anything on this scale – and lacking the inhibitions of previous generations that have.

In his foreword to Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkein writes “One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often to be forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” Tolkein himself was at the Somme. As was my grandfather. And there is more than an echo of no mans land in the marshes of the dead outside Mordor, pale faces under water in shell holes reaching up to seize the minds of the living as they pass.

To be “caught in youth” in 2029 has every prospect of being not only “no less hideous” than 1914 or 1939, but also terminal for the rest of us too if we let them unleash the war they have in mind.

This is not solely a European problem, as this New York Times editorial openly calling for a US war with China, shows.

The UK Strategic Defence Review approaches this as a “whole society” mobilisation. That includes militarisation in our schools. Most of this will be about chilling dissent, but it will also involve a sharp increase in the number of Combined Cadet Corps that will be grooming our children to be killers (and be killed). In a secondary boys school I know of that has had a long tradition of having a CCF – as part of its aspiration to be as much like a public school in the 1920s as it can get away with – one of the consequences of it is that the War Memorial in the Hall is raw with recent names, former students barely into their twenties, dead in Afghanistan or Iraq. And those wars are side shows compared to what they are trying to get us to accept now. Like the late colonial skirmishes that preceded the mass slaughter after 1914. Just an overture.

In Germany a move to reintroduce “voluntary conscription” (as contradictory a phrase as you could even hope for – if its voluntary, it isn’t conscription, and if its conscription it can’t be voluntary) has already led to large scale youth and student mobilisations against it all across the country last weekend. We will need Refuseniks here too; and a movement of them.

In the spirit of Tom Lehrer’s remark that “if there are going to be any songs about World War 3 we had better start writing them now”, mourning the consequences of the war that the leaders of NATO in Europe are preparing for in advance is an essential part of preventing it.

There has been a sharp division on the Left over the war in Ukraine, but not such a division over opposition to increased military spending. Whatever anyone’s view of the former, its vital to be clear about the motivation of our own ruling classes. As they pose it, the need for increased arms spending and “putting our country on a war footing” is a response to “a rising threat” from Russia.

Leaving aside the strenuous effort that every power always makes in the run up to a war to convince itself and its population that its aggressive intent is solely defensive – Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers details this for all the Great Powers in the run up to 1914, also emphasising how far they all genuinely believed that the best deterrent to war was being stronger than their opponent, which posed an escalating cycle or rearmanent and preparatory planning that locked them into the apocalypse that followed – that poses three questions.

1. Does such a threat exist, is it “rising” and, if so, what scale of response is needed to face it?

This is the current balance of forces between Russian and the European NATO countries, leaving the USA and Canada out, as printed in the Observer during the Summer. To spell it out, it shows that Euro NATO, leaving aside Ukraine, has twice as many service personnel, three times as many tanks and artillery pieces and twice as many combat aircraft as the Russians have. And thats now. Are they seriously trying to convince us that doubling what is already a huge advantage is necessary to stop an attack from an evidently weaker power?

Doubling military expenditure only makes sense if they are not contemplating defence but attack. They would have a 7 to 1 advantage in military spending. Its a conventional military cliche that, to be sure of success, an attacker has to have a 3 to 1 advantage. 7 to 1 seems a bit excessive even for that, but for the powers planning to build it to be posing that as “defensive” – because they feel threatened by a power that currently has less than half their capacity stretches credulity a bit far.

2. What does Russia want? Strenuous efforts go into avoiding even posing this question. The source of the war in Ukraine is put down either to some inherent expansionist quality in the Russian character, or megalomaniac psychic flaws in its current leadership. What they have said they want is an end to NATOs eastward expansion – because they feel threatened by it – Ukraine to be a neutral country, a mutual security treaty with the rest of Europe and NATO; and for the Russian speaking areas of Ukraine to be recognised as having seceded and become part of the Russian Federation. Russia has no desire for a war with the rest of Europe. They will fight one if they are attacked, but they are not going to try to expand Westwards.

You don’t have to accept that this is solely from peaceful intent to recognise that any such ambition is militarily and politically impossible. The areas of eastern and southern Ukraine that consistently voted for Russia leaning Parties before 2014 could be absorbed into the RF and there be some prospect of peace afterwards. Absorbing Western Ukraine would be like “trying to swallow a porcupine” as US conservative analyst John Mearsheimer puts it. Poland and the Baltic States even more so. Let alone anywhere further West. As the USSR found out in Afghanistan, and the USA (and UK) in Iraq, you can’t hold a country that really doesn’t want you in occupation of it. There just aren’t enough troops.

3 How would such a war go? If we get to a point that the war preparations stumble, or are manipulated, into a confrontation that escalates into full scale war, there are two scenarios.

• The better one is that it rapidly bogs down into the sort of horrific slog that has been going on in Ukraine for the last three years but on a bigger scale, killing, brutalising and impoverishing all of us as it consumes more and more of our children, lays waste to all the towns and cities on and around the front line, devastates energy and other infrastructure far behind the front. Thats the better scenario.
• The other is that, it all goes very well for Euro NATO forces and they stand poised to break through deeply enough into the RF to crush and dismember it. At that point, Russia’s nuclear weapons would be deployed. Russia’s nuclear war fighting doctrine is that these weapons would be threatened/used in the event of an existential threat to the state. They do not have a “no first use” policy. Nor, in fact does any other nuclear armed power with the exception of China. US nuclear war fighting doctrine has been based on the notion of a succesful nuclear first strike since the early 1960s. So, in the context of Euro NATO “winning” there would be every prospect of the Russian leadership invoking a Europe wide Samson doctrine and bringing the whole continent down with them. A nuclear strike on that scale would not spare the rest of the world, as the nuclear winter effect from even the self immolation of a single continent would have a devastating impact, posing a sharp drop in temperature, harvest failure and global famine.

Remembrance for the victims of all this is best done in advance; and to take the from of mobilising to stop it and make sure there aren’t any.

In 1922, just after WW1, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote part of his 5th Symphony as a battle between the percussion, representing war, and the rest of the orchestra, representing the forces of life. In the opening movement there is a point at which the snare drummer is asked to improvise “as if at all costs he wants to stop the progress of the orchestra” as loudly and intensely as possible to try to drown it out in volleys of explosive detonations, before the forces of life finally triumph and the drums retreat in an elegaic mourning for their previous frenzy.

It is now up to all of us in the labour and peace movements in every country to be that orchestra, and drown out the mad drummers that are trying to lead us to catastrophe.

Please note that Facebook does not allow my blogs to be posted. They claim that some people have complained that they are “abusive”. I find that accusation pretty abusive myself and reject it completely. I suggest that anyone reading this have a look through any of my blogs at random and make your own mind up about whether they are absive or not and, if you like them and really want to annoy Mark Zuckerburg, please post them around on other platforms.

It is all too often a characteristic of movements without power to seek consolation in fantasies – and delusions of granduer.

The Plan for “Another Ukraine” from Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, and endorsed by John McDonnell and others rests on gigantic contradictions.

Graph from Ukrainian support for war effort collapses, which continues

More than three years into the war, Ukrainians’ support for continuing to fight until victory has hit a new low. In Gallup’s most recent poll of Ukraine — conducted in early July — 69% say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight until victory.

This marks a nearly complete reversal from public opinion in 2022, when 73% favored Ukraine fighting until victory and 22% preferred that Ukraine seek a negotiated end as soon as possible.

• With a majority of Ukrainians now wanting peace,
• and recognising that reconquest of Russian speaking territory in the East and Crimea is not realistic, even if they wish it were,
• and driving the war on and on is now dependent on increasingly aggressive and deeply unpopular press ganging,
• as soldiers from the front desert in increasing numbers

USC nevertheless continues to play its role of covering NATO’s control of Western Ukraine with a series of progressive sounding fig leaves.

On the one hand they call for “trade unions and civil society” to bloc with the British, European “and allied” imperial states to carry on cheerleading for the war, on the other they call for outcomes which cannot possibly be achieved through working class subordination to such a bloc.

• The chance of a Ukrainian reconstruction under the aegis of Western powers that does not leave Ukraine’s natural resources exploited “by Western corporations and oligarchs” is nil. The existing reconstruction plan, agreed by the Ukrainian government and the West in 2022 hands the job over to Blackrock. This simply cements the process of privatisation of land and assets that accelerated sharply after 2014, and is partly what Western intervention in Ukraine is FOR.
• Likewise, what level of fantasy do you have to be capable of to imagine that any reconstruction deal in Ukraine, run by its current Oligarchy in subordination to the EU and US, would “empower Ukrainian trade unions and civil society” or “withdraw the proposed Labour Code that restricts workers’ rights and unions”? Thats the last kind of deal they’d even consider, unless they are defeated. The authors of this “plan” must be aware of that, but they put it up all the same.

To achieve either of these aims would require the defeat or overthrow of the Ukrainian oligarchy. Or sufficient pressure on it by a mobilised working class in western Ukraine, with international support in the context of a defeat, that would force it to make concessions. This is not possible if sections of the Left in Ukraine, and internationally, continue to subordinate the working class to backing the war effort in a framework of a national unity that lionises Fascists like Stepan Bandera, denies self determination to the large Russian speaking minority, and seeks to “Ukrainise” the others. When the resistence to conscription becomes a movement for peace, on this “plan”, USC will oppose it.

Trying to mobilise support for increased weapons flows, and the (unspecified but enormous) finance required, means an attack on working class living standards across Europe. Do John McDonnell, or any of the other signatories, imagine that European imperialist governments are going to put the costs of this war onto the backs of the class whose interests it serves? And, if we did have governments committed to massive wealth redistribution in the imperial heartlands, would they also not be looking for a peaceful modus vivendi with the Russians, and others?

This line of thinking becomes positively farcical when they state that we have to “Recognise Trump’s alignment with Putin”. Really? Now?

This line was a convenient one for the European ruling classes, who have used it to mobilise support for exactly what Trump wants, a doubling of European “defence” expenditure, when they already outspend the Russian by 3.5 to 1, during the period when Trump was trying to woo the Russians away from their international bloc with China – the better to pick them both off later. This has been characterised as a “reverse Nixon” or “reverse Kissinger”; which underlines one reason it hasn’t worked. The Russians have a bitter experience of how that worked out for them last time.

Commentators from Timothy Garton Ash to George Monbiot talked this up a storm while they could; and its possible they believed in it. Its a bit more difficult to sustain now that Trump is shooting his mouth off about apocalyptic sanctions on countries that continue to trade with the Russians and deploying nuclear armed submarines “close” to Russia as an explicit warning. And, after a brief revival during the Alaska talks Trump is now making statements like this.

“It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders country. It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense. There is no chance of winning! It is like that with Ukraine and Russia”.

“Crooked and grossly incompetent Joe Biden would not let Ukraine FIGHT BACK, only DEFEND. How did that work out? Regardless, this is a war that would have NEVER happened if I were President – ZERO CHANCE. Interesting times ahead!!!”

Making Trump’s “betrayal” of Ukraine, as if it was ever anything other than a poisoned pawn for US interests, a major plank in mobilising opposition to his state visit in September now looks absurd as well as self defeating. Getting angry that the core of global imperialism is not being aggressive enough in one of its proxy wars, is a self destructive emotion. What do they want him to do, send more nuclear subs?

Now he knows that his wooing attempt on the Russians has failed, Trump is trying to cut his losses. If he goes for a deal at the Alaska talks, this will be to try to freeze the conflict more or less as it is, so that the current inexorable Russian advances are stopped before the Ukrainian Armed Forces collapse like the South Vietnamese Army did in 1975 – putting the asset stripping deal he has already made with Kyiv at risk. This is not inevitable, but tipping points do get reached. Either way, even if he doesn’t, he has already outsourced the resourcing of the war to Europe. So, if the war continues, Ukrainians will fight and die, US arms firms will profit, and the European working class will pay for it.

This is not in our interests.

The last, and probably most important, point is what they mean by a “just peace”. It seems an a priori position on their part is that a “just peace” is one that does not take any Russian concerns into account; a Western imposed one.

In my last blog on this issue I asked USC supporters three questions about the initial Russian proposals to settle the conflict in Ukraine without a war in 2021. These were;

1. No further NATO expansion
2. No forward deployment of US forces or weapons into Eastern Europe
3. A ban on Intermediate Range Missiles
4. A limit on military manouvres and activities
5. Limits on nuclear weapons
6. A Mutual Security Pledge
7. Establishment of Consultation Mechanisms
8. An Indivisibilty of Security Principle.

These seem to me to be to be the basis of a just peace, not simply for Ukraine, but for Europe as a whole. The questions for USC supporters are

• which of of these proposals do you disagree with?
• Would an agreement on these lines be a viable way to end the war?
• Would an agreement on these lines have avoided it in the first place?

I have had no answers. The silence is deafening.

As it is impossible at this point in the war for the West to impose a peace on its terms, the USC “plan” is nothing more than the subaltern Left playing its part in NATOs current attempt to spin the war out in the hope that something will turn up, while it retools its military industrial complex enough to intervene more directly by the end of the decade.

This would, of course, be a suicidal course of action that will be averted by resistance to rearmament and a NATO defeat in Ukraine; at which point “another Ukraine” becomes impossible to avoid.

In his February article, Ukraine’s defeat and the fall of the West, Owen Jones argued that “if we were always going to end up at a point where Russia was going to take land, and Western leaders thought that, but claimed otherwise and made promises to Ukraine to keep the war going to achieving what they believed to be unachievable – well, what that means in terms of countless wasted lives is truly hideous“; noting that this has been in pursuit of what the Washington Post described as “a sensible, cold-blooded strategy for the United States — to attrit an adversary at low cost to America, while Ukraine was paying the butcher’s bill”.

We are now getting to that point.

The way the war ends, or is spun out, is of enormous consequence to whether Europe will remain locked in an escalatory spiral towards the fever dream of a further, wider, deeper – and suicidal – pan European war that infects the minds of General Staffs and newspaper editorial boards; or whether there is an attempt to find a sustainable modus vivendi with Russia that enables de escalation, avoids mutually assured destruction and dislocates Europe from the US imperative to shore up its slipping global dominance with ever more adventurist wars.

The media here reflexively dismisses Russia’s bottom lines for ending the war as “maximalist”; by definition unreasonable, to be dismissed with no further thought or examination. This is of a piece with their usual tactic of obscuring reality with adjectival clouds of emotive association, so it is vital for even those sections of the Left that have cheered on the war, and are still doing it even as a majority of Ukrianians want peace, to get beyond the emotional red mists and look seriously at what the Russians are actually proposing.

A majority of Ukrainains want peace.

These are the key points from the published text of the draft “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees” that Russia presented to Biden in December 2021; and which the US/NATO dismissed out of hand and refused to discuss.

1. No further NATO expansion

• The US would commit to preventing further enlargement of NATO, specifically barring Ukraine and other former Soviet republics from joining the alliance.

• This also included a ban on NATO military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.

2. No Deployment of US Forces or Weapons in Certain Countries

• The treaty would forbid the US from deploying military forces or weaponry in countries that joined NATO after May 1997 (such as Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and others).
• NATO infrastructure would have to be rolled back to pre-1997 locations.

3 Ban on Intermediate-Range Missiles

• Both Russia and the US would be prohibited from deploying ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in areas of their own territory where such missiles could strike the other’s territory.

4 Limit Military Maneuvers and Activities

• Limits on heavy bombers and surface warship deployments: Both sides would restrict the operation of heavy bombers and warships in areas from which they could strike targets on the other’s territory. (Note: In September 2020, Trump’s DOD authorized a B-52 to fly along the Ukrainian coast in the Black Sea.)

5 Nuclear Weapons Restrictions

• All nuclear weapons would be confined to each country’s own national territory. Neither side could deploy nuclear weapons outside its borders. (Note: US just sent a batch of nukes to England.)
• Withdrawal of all US nuclear weapons from Europe and elimination of existing infrastructure for their deployment abroad.

6 Mutual Security Pledge

• Each side would agree not to take any security measures that could undermine the core security interests of the other party.

7. Establishment of Consultation Mechanisms

• Proposals included the renewal or strengthening of direct consultation mechanisms, such as the NATO–Russia Council and the establishment of a crisis hotline.

8 Indivisibility of Security Principle

• Included a reaffirmation that the security of one state cannot come at the expense of the security of another, formalising Russia’s interpretation of the “indivisible security” concept.

The three questions that supporters of the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign should ask themselves is,

• which of of these proposals do you disagree with?
• Would an agreement on these lines be a viable way to end the war?
• Would an agreement on these lines have avoided it in the first place?